New Alchemy Poetry Series presents a reading with Shadab Hashmi, Ghazal Cosmopolitan: Ghazals and Essays on the Culture and Craft of the Ghazal, Joseph Milosch, Landscape of a Woman and a Hummingbird, John Peterson, Tomas Gayton, and Brandon Cesmat, Lestat's Coffee Shop, 3343 Adams Avenue, San Diego, free, 7:00-9:00 (www.lestats.com)

The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes present the nominees and announce the winners for this year's book prizes: ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION: Elif Batuman, The Idiot; Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin; Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties; Gabriel Tallent, My Absolute Darling; Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart; BIOGRAPHY: Ron Chernow, Grant; Jonathan Eig, Ali: A Life; John A. Farrell, Richard Nixon: The Life; Adam Federman, Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray; Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life; CURRENT INTEREST: Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy; James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America; Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America; Lauren Markham, The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life; Rick Wartzman, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America; FICTION: Mohsin Hamid, Exit West; Victor LaValle, The Changeling; Claire Messud, The Burning Girl; Vivek Shanbhang, Srinath Perur (translator), Ghachar Ghochar; Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied; GRAPHIC NOVEL/COMICS: Gabrielle Bell, Everything is Flammable; Manuele Fior, Jaime Richards (translator), The Interview; Leslie Stein, Present; Connor Willumsen, Anti-Gone; Yuichi Yokoyama, Iceland; HISTORY: Stephen Alford, London's Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare's City; Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam; Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes; Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America; MYSTERY/THRILLER: Michael Connelly, The Late Show; Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean; Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird; Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of American Martyrs; Ivy Pochoda, Wonder Valley; POETRY: Alessandra Lynch, Daylily Called it A Dangerous Moment; Shane McCrae, In the Language of my Captor; Evie Shockley, semiautomatic; Patricia Smith, Incendiary Art: Poems; David Wojahn, For the Scribe; SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Cornelia Dean, Making Sense of Science: Separating Substance from Spin; Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution; Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst; Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence; Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams; YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: E. Lockhart, Genuine Fraud; Jason Reynolds, Long Way Down; Dashka Slater, The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives; Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give; Renée Watson, Piecing Me Together; the winner of the ROBERT KIRSCH AWARD, John Rechy, will be honored, along with the INNOVATOR'S AWARD recipient Glory Edim, Well-Read Black Girl; and the CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE recipient Benjamin Taylor, The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered, Bovard Auditorium, University of Southern California campus, Los Angeles, free admission, get tickets in advance from the website, 7:00 (events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/book-prizes)

Winners of the 8th Annual Beyond Baroque Poetry Contest will read from their work, winners are as follows: First Place, "Immigration Algorithm" by Mark Svenfold; Second Place, "Algae" by Nikki Ochoa; Third Place, "Plenty: County Galway" by Lauren Conklin; runners up were "When the War Comes" by Kelly Grace Thomas, "Seeing the Big Dog" by Katherine Ogle, "sympathy cards" by Althea Irby, "The Blvd.s of Los Angeles" by Phillip West, "Surrender, She Said" by Steve McDonald, "Grass Eaters" by John Blair, and "The Famous Poet Asks Me For Naked Photos" by Alexis Rhone Fancher, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice, free, 4:00 (www.beyondbaroque.org)

Skylight Books celebrates Independent Bookstore Day, featuring editors of Exposition Review in celebration of their third issue "Orbit," 2:00: literary trivia, prizes, you can come solo or with a team of up to four players; starting at 5:00, Exposition Review launch party and reading, Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, free, 10:00 a.m. to closing (www.skylightbooks.com/event)